Holly is talking about not just the down and outers emergency room patients who, as she picks beer-bottle glass out of their scalps drunkenly tell her "Gosh, ain't you as sweet thing... do you have a boyfriend?"

I just say "yes." But that's a partial answer, because they asked the wrong question. They asked something like five different kinds of the wrong question.

The full answer is: "Yes, but he doesn't care who I sleep with, but I bloody well care who I sleep with!"

Perhaps I'm reading too much into the drunken advances of the sort of guy who tries to hit on the person who's picking glass out of his wounds, but it unnerves me that my boyfriend's right to my body is counted as more important than my own, even when he's not around. They're trying to establish whether I'm owned, not whether I'm interested.

Source: The Pervocracy

She doesn't say, but I'd like to imagine, that drunken women patients in similar circumstances ask Holly's male colleagues similar questions about whether they have girlfriends. Based on my experiences as a beer-bar bartender that catered to the young, hip, and alive crowd only at night, I'm guessing that too does at least occasionally happen.

Aside: This does not mean "oh well, then if women really do ask men then it's all hunky dory. In particular if you read the comments on Holly's post it's pretty clear that while women sometimes do pull the ownership card, even the drunken well-too-bad-you're-"taken" version, it's rarely done in the context of what amounts to an extension of street harassment.

That said, there really is a sort of general respect for relationship "ownership" that goes beyond respect for particular individuals in those relationships. Since gender is socially constructed I'm perfectly happy to acknowledge that different genders might have different reasons for honoring relationship "ownership." For instance it could be that men want to know because an angry boyfriend might confront him over messing with "his" partner. And it could be that women are just disinclined to mess with another woman's partner for fear that said partner would eventually just mess around with her. And no, seriously, it really could be those things.

I'd just point out that what makes it gendered isn't that men might respond more to one concern than another. What makes it gendered is that outside of gender thinking both concerns -- confrontation with a transgressed partner and the prospect of being run around on in turn -- are exactly equally probable outcomes regardless of the sex of either or both parties. (Because, seriously, relationship ownership transcends sex, orientation, identity, etc.)

Anyway, years and years ago, maybe as far back as the late 1980s, one of the local mainstream newspapers briefly carried a syndicated arts-and-leisure section columnist who focused on intentional single life. At one point he wrote a column about how the implications of saying "my boyfriend" or "my wife," or "my date for the evening," or even "my friend" are problematic in terms of presumption and ownership. He said it would probably be a better idea to just say "this is John, we're married" or "Joan and I went out last night."

I can't remember if the columnist said it outright, but I was really struck by the notion that speaking about your relationships in terms of shared experience rather than possession wasn't just excruciatingly "correct." Instead it also carries the implication that instead of being with you because, well, they're obliged to be because they're "yours," if someone's not a possession they're probably with you because want to be with you.

Call me crazy, here, but this seems like yet another lesson people with experience in polyamory and promiscuity can bring back to the culture of monogamy: in all but the most toxic relationships you're not partners with people because as "your" partner they have to be, any more than (again for the most part) you're partners with someone else not because you're "theirs" but because you actually kind of like, love, have the hots for, are interested in, like being around, and so on.